HEYBALI – A group of trekking guides in Lombok became unlikely internet heroes this week after tracking down the owner of a small fortune in scattered banknotes, cash that, according to witnesses, had been snatched and dropped by wild monkeys along one of the island’s most popular hiking trails.
Footage shared by the Instagram account @lombok_patenadventure shows three local guides collecting stray 100,000-rupiah notes strewn across the trail on Pergasingan Hill in Sembalun, East Lombok. Alongside the cash, they also recovered a phone, a passport, keys, and several other personal items belonging to an American tourist.
A Trail Littered With Someone’s Belongings
The footage was recorded Thursday, August 20, capturing a scene that guides say has become an increasingly familiar hazard on the popular trekking route: wild macaques snatching unattended bags and belongings from hikers, then abandoning the contents once they realize there’s nothing edible inside.
“Yesterday morning at Pergasingan Hill in Sembalun. The foreign tourist’s belongings had been grabbed and carried off by monkeys,” said Muhammad Rizki Rangga Yuda, the guide who owns the account, in comments to detikBali on Friday evening, August 21.
Rangga said he and two fellow guides discovered the scattered cash while descending the hill with their own clients. He described being genuinely startled by the sight of banknotes strewn across the trail. “We found the money and belongings already scattered everywhere. We were also accompanying our own foreign guests at the time,” Rangga said, estimating the total recovered cash at between 4 and 5 million rupiah, roughly 250 to 320 US dollars.
A Trail-Side Search for the Rightful Owner
Once the guides had gathered everything, the real challenge began: figuring out who it belonged to. With no obvious way to identify the owner on the spot, Rangga and his colleagues took a direct approach, stopping every foreign hiker who passed by.
“We asked every foreign tourist who passed us while hiking whether the items belonged to them. Eventually, we found the owners, two foreign nationals, a man and a woman, along with their own guide,” Rangga said.
Relief, Panic, and a Declined Reward
The tourists’ reaction, according to Rangga, swung between panic and pure relief once they realized their cash, passport, and phone had actually been recovered rather than lost for good. They reportedly offered a reward to the guides for their honesty, an offer Rangga and his colleagues turned down.
For travelers planning treks around Sembalun and Mount Rinjani’s surrounding trails, the incident is a useful reminder that Lombok’s wild macaque population poses a genuine, if usually harmless, risk to unsecured belongings. Guides across the region routinely advise hikers to keep bags zipped, valuables out of sight, and food sealed away, precautions that, in this case, weren’t quite enough to stop a determined monkey, though the outcome turned out considerably better than most lost-property stories thanks to a trio of guides who chose to do the right thing.
